


The Queen of Everything

by DaScribbla



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Discussion of Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Guilt, Irony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 03:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11455284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaScribbla/pseuds/DaScribbla
Summary: Toomes watched the helicopters hover there by the monument and told himself not to break down in front of the men.





	The Queen of Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of feelings about Adrian Toomes that I didn't expect.

On the screen, helicopters circled the monument, the bastard in tights scaled the face of it, and Adrian Toomes felt himself grow years older.

_I could fly there,_ he thought. _I could fly there, and I just might make it in time._

Doing this job was a burden of choice, always; if he went to save his daughter, he risked exposing everything he’d done just so she could make it to Wellesley with minimal debt. Insane, what college tuition cost nowadays. Toomes had gotten a biology degree for practically nothing in comparison, for as much good as it had done him, ultimately. But Liz’s degree wouldn’t be useless: she had her mother’s intuition, her father’s ability to lead a crowd, and the smarts that were all her own. 

He watched the helicopters hover there and told himself not to break down in front of the men.

 

Most kids, when you asked them what they wanted to be, said _firefighter, veterinarian, Tinker Bell._ At first grade orientation, Toomes had sat with his wife and all the other parents and watched their six-year-old proudly tell Mrs. Johnson, _“I wanna be president!”_ He’d say that was the moment he realized how much he loved her, but he’d been putty in her little baby fingers long before she could say much more than _da-da._

When he came home from work, he made a point of showering before hugging her or her mother hello.

 

When the chitauri attacked New York, she’d just turned ten. The day after her birthday, he and her mother had watched the attack on television after Liz was sent to bed. 

“What do we tell her?” he’d asked Doris after they’d switched off the TV. 

“The truth,” Doris said simply.

“The truth would give the kid nightmares for weeks!” 

“She’s going to hear about it from the kids at school anyway,” Doris pointed out. “If we don’t tell her, they will.”

She’d been right, of course — Doris was always right, it was spooky in its invariability — but part of him hated throwing his princess right in front of the dragon. But she wasn’t interested in the aliens very much; she was too busy drawing hero after hero after hero, showing him proudly.

“I like the lady best,” she told him. In secret, he tacked up the pictures she gave him around his desk. Something to smile at when the job got tough.

 

Age eleven turned out to be old enough to get soundly embarrassed when he called her princess, so he switched to gumdrop, just to make her roll her eyes. He was her dad, he told her often, and it was his job to embarrass her. 

“No,” she’d tell him, all-knowing. “Your job’s to clean up.”

He’d kiss her forehead and tell himself not to feel guilty whenever he saw another shooting or armed robbery in the headlines of the news. He’d been at the job for just under two years, and lying still felt wrong.

 

Now, she was two months to eighteen, and Toomes was facing the all too real possibility that he may be witnessing her death there, through the screen and through the stone. He was on the phone, too, Doris quiet and drawn on the other end of the line.

“It’ll be fine,” he told her. “They’re going to come driving up to the school on that bus again, and it’ll be fine.”

_“Adrian,”_ she said softly. _“But what if she’s not_ on _the bus?”_

He couldn’t reply. His vision swam with memories of seeing her being born, holding her for the first time, hearing her cry…

“She’s going to come back,” he told his wife unsteadily. “I will not let anything else happen.”

 

Early on, he’d learned why so many in this line of work didn’t have families. The resultant anxiety was enough to kill. Fear was his natural state of being. 

_You don’t need to date,_ he told her often. _We hold you girls back._ For the most part, she didn’t, as far as he was aware (it was hard to accept, sometimes, that she was a teenager and that she no doubt did things with the hope that he wouldn’t find out). 

Having been one himself, he knew what teenage boys were like. The mere notion of her going out with one was gut-churning. As cliché as it was, he’d never stopped to consider his or any other man’s pattern of thought until the day he realized that his little girl was turning heads.

He didn’t want to be _that_ dad. The one who panicked if his daughter so much as mentioned a masculine-sounding name in passing (for future reference: Ryan was a girl). But he had damned good reasons.

There was a real risk involved. It was all too easy to imagine men who’d left with his daughter’s hand in their own just hours before now holding her at gunpoint in exchange for a cut of the pie, or deadlier weapons, or something else. He did this so she could have her own life, not one that would get traced continually back to him and his mistakes.

Beyond that, he lived in fear of the day when his daughter and his wife would look at him with hurt in their eyes and try to connect the dots between the man they’d known for so long and the footage they showed on television. The man and the mugshot. 

He feared, perhaps even more than he loved. 

 

As the footage played in the silent room (the men kept silent; they didn’t have daughters who still tolerated their terrible jokes and pet names, who were going to be the goddamned president of the goddamned United States someday, just you wait), he remembered the last time he had seen her. He’d left for the bunker nearly a week ago. 

Breakfast, the bustle of school mornings in the Allan-Toomes household. 

“You still want to be president?” he’d asked her as he handed her scrambled eggs. “I have that on video, you know. I’m never letting you forget.”

She hummed, made a show of thinking about it as she sprinkled pepper on her breakfast. “Actually,” she said, “I’m thinking I’ll start small. Senator will do to start.”

“As small as that, huh?” said Doris from the opposite end of the breakfast table. 

“Well, _yeah,”_ she said. “You can’t just start at being queen of everything. You have to work your way up somehow.”

“Well,” Toomes said, scraping out the last of the eggs onto his own plate. “For whatever it’s worth, you’ve got my vote, gumdrop.”

“You can’t vote for queens, Dad,” she pointed out. “It’s a whole other system of government.”

 

She’d said more than that, and now he found himself racking his brains to remember what, what, what.

He was only casually religious, but he murmured some prayers anyway: that he’d at least get to see her turn eighteen, to stall her before her last prom by taking too many photos, to stand up in the bleachers and cheer when she got her diploma at the end of the spring. He would be there. He would be.

There was no point to any of it if he wasn’t.

 

Ten minutes later, the news confirmed that the students inside the monument were safely on the ground again. Toomes, halfway into his suit already, sagged in relief, dragging a hand over his face as he tried to remember how breathing worked.

 

The news had told him they were all safe, but he didn’t believe it until his phone rang just a few minutes after, and he heard her voice on the other end of the line, telling him not to worry, that she was all right, that she wasn’t even scared. He knew she was lying. Dad always knows.

_“Come home soon?”_ she whispered. _“I don’t want it to just be me and Mom.”_

“Of course,” he said. He was already searching for his keys amid the pile of papers on his desk. Where were they, where were they… “I’m going to be there as soon as I can. Just sit tight.”

 

But by the time he reached home, it was night, she was upstairs and asleep, and there was nothing more to do than go to bed, stare at the ceiling, and imagine what might have happened had nobody reached her in time.

**Author's Note:**

> I love comments, y'all.


End file.
